Arquivo da tag: varieties of English around the world

When people think of the English language, they usually associate it with American, British, Australian or Canadian English, however English is spoken in many other countries as a native language, and in many others as a second or foreign language.

More than 300 million people around the world speak English as a first language. English is used as an official language in more than 50 states. About 1500 million people speak English as a second language. All in all almost two billion people can speak English. That’s a third of the world’s population.

The statistics show that the most spoken language worldwide is English with almost two billion people being able to speak it, of whom only 375 million are native speakers. This means that you’re much more likely to speak English with someone whose English is their second or foreign language than with a native speaker.

Due to this, if you’re an English learner you might have trouble understanding people depending on where you are and who you’re talking to. In case you’re an English Teacher it’s a nice idea to share this information with your students and even prepare them for the real world. Bearing that in mind, if you’re learning the language in order to work at an international company or travel abroad, you might want to be aware and perhaps start practicing listening to different kinds of English accents, especially the ones you’ll be dealing with.

That being said, let’s see some examples of different accents, shall we?

I hope you enjoyed this post. The idea was not analyzing it in depth, but to g
ive you an overall idea of how broad English is. I believe that it helps us English learners and teachers to understand language a little better.